Computerwife is a highly emblematic name for our time. An era where even the most intimate of relationships are experienced, to some degree, through the mediation of machines. Relationships are cemented by swapped Reels and TikToks, many of our livelihoods are earned through sorting email threads and responding timely to people doing the same in another part of the country, and deep connections are forged through the cultivation of common interests as they are aggregated in the digital squares of social media. As wonderful as these technological enhancements to our natural inclination to socialize and court our fellow human beings can be, there is also an emptiness. For every returned DM, there are hours of mind-eradicating scrolling. You might spend all night playing GTA Online with a friend, but you could just as easily be playing alone or functionally alone, navigating a sea of anonymous strangers. You can binge a show with your boo, but the TV doesn't care if you are alone or accompanied; the content tube awaits your eyes like a ripe kiwi in a vacuum blender. In other words, you might not always be alone, but you might as well be; your only real and constant companion is the eerie cold light of the black mirror. Computerwife's Addie Warncke grapples with this incessant eon of alienation on her self-titled LP by attempting to pull herself up from the depths of the dark web with 11 autobiographical sonic essays that outline the shape and texture of her psyche as she strives (and maybe fails) to recapture some sense of human warmth. The green-eyed glare of "You Make It Look So Easy" is a drowsy falter of needling hooks that emerges like a dream from a trench of cerebral fog to bring you face to face with an avatar of your own ambition that is so perfect you can only respond by dashing it into a heap of tear-drop-shaped shards. "Pathetic" rides a torrent of shoegaze riffs like a suicide slice through a breathy crescent of despair, only to wash ashore abruptly with a fresh set of scars for its efforts. The warm and buzzy reprieve of "I Get Better Everyday" is a welcome respite from the album's more disaffected moments, bouncing off the rubbery frisk of its bass cords to scale up the humid skeletal murmur of Addie's melodic drift like a mouse wriggling up from a dead cat's stomach towards the gleam of daylight freedom that cascades down between its prone jaws and into it the deceased beast's throat. Finally, "Stardust" pulls you back into the low gravity of the internet's ephemeral dungeon space, an automated, anthropomorphic lamplight that beckons you into hungry shadows where you are stripped and reborn as a cylinder full of frog eyes. It's a desperate gambit Addie is playing her, one whose sharp edges are padded and polished by playful melodic turns and a deeply emotive sense of production and arrangement. There is a beating heart buried within this album's layered of silicon mesh, and if you can decide the rhythm of its pulse, you will likely be confronted with something more distressing than a mere SOS.
